


ashes

by sonicSymphony



Series: Particlestuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-29
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-02 23:31:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonicSymphony/pseuds/sonicSymphony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A failed coup and the end of your world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ashes

Something is attaching to your ship.

For some reason, your thoughts are bleary, and it takes too much of your mental capacity to even figure _that_ out. It takes an additional moment for you to realize that the world is sideways and blurry, though the latter can most likely be attributed to your lack of glasses. You head is _pounding_ , and you try and lift your hand to feel for a wound but your arm won’t cooperate. Confirmation isn’t truly needed, though; through the haze, you can feel sticky blood still pumping from the back of your head and pooling onto the floor.

If it falls through the grates, it’ll hit the Helmsman in the floor underneath you. Someone would be unhappy with you if you made the battery uncomfortable, but you can’t quite remember whom at the moment, so you don’t particularly care.

A spear of panic, sharp and attentive, just confuses you further. Why were you thinking about Helmsmen, anyway? You’re on one of your smaller ships FLARPing. Vris just knocked you over with a cannon or something, and that’s why you’re so disoriented. You’ll have to set fire to her sails in retaliation.

But… no, that’s not quite right, is it? There _is_ a Helmsman below you, because you’re in space.

When the panic hits you this time, it does not fade.

You try to move again, but your limbs are still unresponsive. Somehow, you manage to crane your neck to get a decent view of the command screen about ten feet in front of you. If there is lettering on it, you won’t be able to read it, but you’re not missing anything because it’s entirely blank in a way you’ve never seen it, not even when the ship is docking. There’s always something going on, and it should never be _black_ like that; it means that the entire ship has shut down.

Closing your eyes to filter all of your concentration into your ears, you listen to the sounds below you. You strain to hear speakers crackling or computers calculating or even some of Captor’s sass, but the entire helmsblock is a deathly quiet. That is all the confirmation you need.

The ship is dead, and you should be too.

You wonder if anyone picked up your distress call. Any ships in the area would’ve probably belonged to Her, so that’s why you didn’t receive any aid: no one in their right mind would want to aid the makeshift flagship of an unpopular Heiress. Something nags at the back of your mind, telling you that you weren’t alone out there, but it’s a confusing thought and your head hurts too much to try and make sense of it.

It turns out you don’t have to, because you hear the hiss of the bay doors opening. You try to turn your head to look but nothing moves, and metal footsteps halt. A low whistle echoes through the room before the intruder begins to head down the stairs.

“Dead,” a raspy voice you vaguely recognize hisses into what must be an earpiece or some shit, because he’s certainly not talking to you. “All of them.”

You can’t find your voice to protest. Hell, maybe you are dead and your head is just taking a few minutes to catch up with the rest of you. Isn’t that what happens when someone is nearly bisected? The brain can live for a very long time as long as you’re still taking in oxygen, and since you’re a sea dweller, you’ll last even longer, even if you’re technically as good as dead.

Dimly, you’re aware of more footsteps hurrying down the corridor towards the bridge. Your secondary eyelids blink slowly even though you’re not underwater, but the troll in the room doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, he walks straight past you to attend to someone else near you.

This time, you manage to move your head a millimeter. You cannot see where the interloper went, but one of your hands is in view. Not being able to move it still doesn’t make sense, because there isn’t anything impairing it besides your hazy mind. The only strange thing is that some of your blood is crusted under your fingernails.

But… that might not be your blood? It seems too light. Just as realization hits you and everything comes zooming back, another troll enters the bridge.

The keening noise that fills the room is nothing you’ve ever heard before. You don’t think it’s an alarm because even the mayday command isn’t that shrill, but then you realize it’s you. A very recognizable string of curses fills the room and it’s not the first troll speaking but the new one, and in your sudden burst of clarity you try and pull yourself around. Tavros is standing next to a statue in the same direction your other arm is pointing, and he looks terrified and pitying and unfathomably _sad_. “Block his view!” Karkat demands, fast approaching. “Don’t let him see—!”

But you already have.

“ _Fef!_ ” comes from your raw throat in a pitch you weren’t sure you could even make. The sound immediately turns into a coughing fit, and finally your limbs work as you curl into a little ball. Your ribs are on fire and there are blood smears around you but _that’s not a statue_.

Your moirail is strung neatly from the ceiling in cables and wires that distantly reminds you of a helm. Wires are threaded through bloody wrists, one of her fins is barely clinging to her face by a thread of skin, her gills are ripped open to expose her insides. Her trident is speared between her legs to help keep her up, as she can’t do it on her own because she’s _dead_.

 _No she’s not_ , your mind instantly rebels as someone drops down beside you. _I would have protected her, I’m a better Captain than that, a better moirail, she’s mine and no fucking one can take her away from me._

“Eridan.” The voice is leagues softer than you’ve ever heard it as the owner rests a hand on your cheek and turns your head away. He says something else but it’s just a buzz in your ears as he unfastens the cape around your neck and maneuvers it so it’s plugging up a gaping hole you hadn’t noticed was in your side. _I had gills there,_ you think belatedly. You sort of remember acknowledging your almost-in-half state earlier, but your mind just skipped it over truly comprehending it. Your next thought is, _Fef_.

You try and call to her, uncaring that there are others there to witness, but your throat still won’t respond. Instead, you think at her, knowing that she’ll definitely hear you, because she’s your serendipitous moirail and she always listens. _Fef, love, come on, get down from there. I_ need _you, Fef, I can’t move and they could come back and I’m scared. I’m scared like you were the first time you were at my hive and a storm came through. We stayed in my shitty wand pile almost all night, remember? Do you remember, Fef? I remember how my chin fit perfectly between your horns and how your nails made divots in my shoulder blades and I discovered that your feet were ticklish and I made sure that I always breathed in time with you. Remember? Now you have to be there for me._

“Oh you poor pathetic asshole,” Karkat says. It sounds like someone is stepping on his windpipe. You vaguely feel one of his hands wrap around your horn.

“He’ll be dead soon,” a voice you’ve never heard before states. “A mercy culling would suit him, wouldn’t it? Die with his moirail, and all that.”

“Fuck no!” Karkat snarls at her, and you feel his grip tighten. “You don’t know how fast this bastard can get back on his feet, he’ll be _fine_. Don’t shove your goddamn desires onto him just because you didn’t die with Mishin.”

The female troll storms away, and Tavros says lowly, “That was harsh.” It’s a good of a time as any to finally make your move.

You lunge forward, movements awkward and painful as it feels like something is ripping out your insides and splitting your skull open, and Karkat’s grip on your horn snaps your neck back. “Let me go!” you scream, but it comes out as a hiss. “ _Fef_!”

Then Kar does the unspeakable: he paps your cheek.

You see red. He does it again and again, making shooshing, cooing noises as he tries to calm you down, but you just shriek and knock him over, sending you both tumbling across the gated floor.

“DON’T YOU DARE! DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE! You’re not my moirail my moirail is strung up from the fucking ceiling don’t you fucking touch me _I want my moirail give her back to me right now_.”

The hilt of Karkat’s sickle comes down hard on your temple.

* * *

 

Revolutions are a hard thing to orchestrate, especially when you have brainwashed masses and too little allies. _Two ships_ , you were trying to remember earlier. There were two main ships for your meager forces: one for the Heiress and the other for the scion of the Signless Sufferer and the Summoner reborn. Two ships, three incredibly important people, two facets of a fucked up hemospectrum, divided so if attacked, the damage wasn’t complete. 

Ascension was what you’d been anticipating your entire life and what Fef had been planning for since her lusus whispered her stories of duty and regality. After Fef announced herself and Karkat stood up to the drones and said _no_ , a new era began, and any day you were expecting the Empress herself to show up and stick a culling fork through your moirail.

But that wasn’t what ended up happening. The very edges of the great Alternian Empire were the safest place for fugitives like you, but they were also home to other dangers, like brigands, deserters, and criminals. Pirates preyed on any ship stupid enough to come near them, and that’s what happened to you: taken down by a band of savage space pirates from a planet Her Imperious Condescension obliterated.

Any Alternian ships in the area quietly turned their heads away as to not be caught associating with the Heiress, and the distress signal did not reach Vriska in time. A bitter part of you thinks that she did it on purpose, but you doubt Karkat would have let her.

Now, as you waste away in “recovery”, there is little for you to do besides stare at the ceiling and contemplate your failures. The more logical side of you always knew Fef would be dead soon, skewered on the end of a culling fork. Since the moment you were old enough to understand that, you’d planned to take out the Crosshairs and destroy anyone who was in the vicinity. Maybe if you were lucky, you’d take a chunk out of old Condy before you were a violet splatter across the floor.

But the female troll—Emilen, you’ve been told she’s called, Emilen Triske—was right about wanting to die with your moirail. If Fef were here, she’d tell you it was just a stupid highblood thing, but in the end, you _are_ a stupid highblood thing, aren’t you? You were stupid because you were embarrassed to show your feelings in public and you’d never initiate anything because she was the higher-blooded in the relationship and you let them mold you even though Fef’s light had tried to flush all of their archaic customs and stigmas away. You’re still a traditionalist, but at the core you always will love her more than any beliefs. Dying with her was an honor you’d been shirked of.

It wasn’t like you hadn’t tried, both on you ship and in the tiny medbay on Vriska’s. It’s just that something wouldn’t let you. Whether it was sea dweller biology or stellar technology or Karkat was unclear.

“You cheated me,” you tell him when he walks in, as you have done every day for the past two weeks.

“I know it would be much too ambitious to try and get a ‘thanks for saving my ungrateful ass’ out of you,” he responds as he plops down into his seat, “but you could at least try to sound a little fucking obliged.”

“My moirail is dead,” you say.

“I know,” he responds. He hasn’t said he’s sorry for it since the first day.

You turn away from him and onto the hole in your side that’s a bit less gaping now and plan to ignore him for the next hour or two or however long he stays. Today, it feels even more unbearable than usual for him to just sit there and stare at you, so you try a new strategy: crying.

He leaves you alone.

* * *

 

“There’s a corner of the empire on the other side of the galaxy,” Kar tells you, “that’s always overlooked and battered and it’s somewhere people go if they want to be forgotten." 

You don’t respond, opting to instead stare out of the panoramic window to your right. The bridge of Vriska’s ship is in a messier state than yours, and you have to swallow down bile as you see a Captain that isn’t you or a Helmsman that isn’t Sollux. You don’t even let yourself imagine Fef sitting in Vriska’s place in the command chair (because even if you were technically the Captain, she was always in control), issuing orders and tossing her long hair over her shoulder so it doesn’t impair her view as she stares out of the viewport at the universe. _Look, Eridan,_ she used to say at least a thousand times a day. _Did you see that dust cloud? That’s a very sturdy looking asteroid. I wonder if that star is just flickering or if it’s a supernova._  

She was excited about every mote and every glimmer, and now she’s dead.

_It’s not fair._

“What’s it called?” you inquire dully, playing his game even though you couldn’t care less about whatever fucking colony he’s talking about.

“Fenix 12,” he says. “I don’t know who named it, but whoever did deserves to be dragged into a pit of starving hissbeasts.”

“Also tell that to the guy who named Alternia,” you try to quip, but your voice is just as deadpan as it’s been the past perigee. “Why are you telling me this, Kar?”

“I hate this ship, and since… y’know, I can tell Vriska wants us gone. She probably wants to become a space pirate and reenact Pupa Pan with Tavros all day.” You flinch. Kar does you a favor and acts like he didn’t notice. “We could go, just you and me. Start over.”

“Why?”

“I never wanted any of this,” Kar confesses, even though you’ve always known. “I just went along because she was so goddamn convincing, and maybe… you know I think my Ancestor was a professional bullshitter, but I’ve read all of the stuff and heard all of the lore and I think the future he saw could’ve happened, if she’d taken the throne.” He doesn’t clarify who “her” is, because it’s obvious and no one has said her name around you. “I don’t think anyone will bother us there, and I know you always wanted your glory and your battles and your admiralty, but—”

“Not anymore,” you finish for him quietly.

His image being reflected in the window deflates, tension leaking out of his shoulders and rushing into the void. “Yeah. We’re wanted trolls, we’ll be hunted until we die, and even though I don’t regret any of it this has made it so if we’re seen by any of the Fleet, we’re dead. So… consider it.”

There’s a long stretch of silence. You trace the rim of the table you’re seated at with a fingertip, staring out into the distant starfield. “I do.”

He blinks. “You… what? You’ll come with me?”

You shake your head. “I regret it. Every single fucking second.”

Something deep and painful appears on Karkat’s face. “Eridan.”

He says other stuff too, but you don’t hear any of it because you’re focusing on the ringing in your ears and not falling over (you’re still incredibly weak, and you’re starting to think that certain aspects of your injuries being marked as “permanent” isn’t too farfetched). Kar watches you go back to your assigned quarters with that same desolate expression, and you wonder how you ever thought that his only emotion was angry.

* * *

 

“Take it easy.” Kar’s breath tickles your fin, and it twitches slightly. “Bioflesh is sensitive. You just can’t tear off the bandage all at once like you’re ripping someone’s arm off.” 

You scoff, “Well _you’re_ certainly not doing it.” The gesture would be too pale.

Huffing, he heaves himself onto the bathroom counter. You’re sitting on the toilet, hands clutched around the edges of a giant gray patch that’s been covering your side for perigees. It was placed there within hours of your arrival on Vriska’s ship, and now it’s coming off two weeks into your stay on Fenix 12. It was meant to regrow the massive hunk of flesh you lost from there, but what you’re most worried about are your gills.

“Gently,” Karkat urges.

“I know,” you bite back before finishing the job.

The flesh is smooth and gray and scarred around the edges. There are the ridges of your ribs and the rise and fall of your air sacks don’t seem to displace anything, but there is an obscene lack of gills on the right side of your torso.

“We knew they probably wouldn’t—” Kar starts, but you’re not listening because you’re too busy punching the mirror.

“ _The fuck!_ ” Karkat exclaims as he grabs one of your horns. “It’s okay, the left side is fucking fine, you’re not a pathetic fucking land dweller like the rest of us peons, it is _okay_!”

“ _No it’s not!”_ you shriek, because it’s not okay and it never has been. Nothing has been okay since you fucked everything up and let a potentially harmful ship into your airspace. “It’s _not_ okay, and it’s _never_ going to be okay again, so stop trying to fucking moirail me! I’m not pale for you and _I never will be_!”

You don’t worry that it’s too harsh or that he’ll bash your head into the wall. “That’s not what this is about—” he starts, releasing your horn, but you cut him off.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Kar, it’s _always_ been about that,” you snarl. “You wouldn’t let me fucking die when I wanted to, you refuse to let me honor my moirail and her legacy by joining her, and you won’t fucking stop trying to fix me. You’re pale for me, and it is _not_ _fucking appreciated_ , so _stop_!”

Snarling, he pushes you back so the tips of your horns scrape the remnants of the mirror and make a harsh, unpleasant sound. “I AM NOT PALE FOR YOU!” he screams, livid. “God fucking _dammit_ , Ampora, I have been flushed for you since you—you bigoted, casteist asshole extraordinaire—took one look at my blood color and decided that you did not give a single fuck.” He pins your wrists down to the countertop as he leans in. “I have pitied you for a long fucking time, and it’s only gotten worse after all of this, and I know that losing Feferi fucked you up beyond belief but fucking hell, _she’d want you to live_.”

You do the only conceivable thing: punch him in the face and leave him stunned on the bathroom floor. _Apologize to him_ , a voice in your head says. It’s not yours, but it’s achingly familiar. _Eridan Ampora, you apologize to him right now!_

 _I’ll apologize when you come back to me,_ you reply, desperation making your inner voice raw, even though she’s just in your head and you’re in your head and you wish all of this was just in your fucking head so you’d wake up in a recuperacoon on Alternia and all of this would be just a long, horrible daymare.

Kar doesn’t look at you when you storm out, and you certainly don’t look at him. You’re sure you’d just end up an inconsolable puddle on the floor yet again.

* * *

 

“I’m sorry.” 

No, this is wrong. He shouldn’t be apologizing to you—he did nothing wrong, except for giving off some pale vibes when that wasn’t his intention.

“It was… too soon for me to dump all of that on you.” He’s talking to your back, since you’re curled up on your side staring at the wall. You can do that while “in bed” now, because no one uses recuperacoons off planet and this colony has only these weird plush rectangles. “I was expecting things from you that you’re obviously too damaged to give me right now, and hell, you’d probably never reciprocate in the first place, so…” He sighs, and you can hear him reach back to scratch his neck. “I’m sorry. Just forget about it.”

Silently, you hold out a hand behind you. Your fingers feel strangely weightless without all of the rings that usually adorn them; you don’t know if you can bring yourself to ever put them on again. They remind you too much of what you had stripped from you. “Kar?”

Quietly and deliberately, he moves across the room, and before he takes your hand, he hesitates a few inches away. You close the space for him, leaning towards him and ending up with your back on the bed and face towards the ceiling, with Karkat looking down on you with confused and worried eyes.

“I’m fucked up,” you tell him earnestly, “and I will be fucked up for the rest of my pathetic life. The things that made me—my position, my ambitions, my moirail, my ship, my home—are all gone. All that is left,” you squeeze his hand, “is you, and if you’re willing to take on the responsibility, you need to know that I’m nothing now.”

“No,” he snaps, sounding pissed, “that’s not how it works. I’m sick of you thinking that you were the only one who lost something that day. Terezi and Sollux were on that ship too, and even though I treated them like complete shit while they were alive, I fucking _loved_ them. I’d trade my life for theirs, for Feferi’s. But that’s not how life works, so you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. It just so happens, however, that by some fucked up dose of situational irony that only the powers-that-be and all of that shit understands, I really, _really_ care about you.” He falls down on top of you, splaying out perpendicularly. “I never told Terezi or Sollux how I felt about them, at the end, so that’s why I told you. So now we’ve beached ourselves on this weird asteroid colony with no one but each other, and you know what? We could be hot shit here, so buck up and make something of yourself.”

You don’t know if you can. There will always be a fuchsia diamond carved into your bloodpusher and you will always regret many of your actions, but Kar is right. You can’t remember a situation where he was ever wrong. Pitying him won’t be hard, you think, but you can’t force yourself into a quadrant; you learned that when you were around seven. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Eventually, you fall asleep like that—with Karkat’s tiny body draped over yours, his mouth open and drooling on the sheets near your free hand, and your other hand still clasped tightly in his. It’s not the kind of future you imagined by any means, but you know she’d want you to at least _try_ to be happy, so with heavy eyelids and a tired mind, you agree to make the attempt.

**Author's Note:**

> Holy shit I wrote something that isn't erifef and they're actually _trolls_. Gasp.
> 
> I still suck at titles. Most of this was written months ago, but in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I decided to polish it up. I hope you enjoyed it!


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